Embodiment of Divine Knowledge in Early Judaism

Andrei A. Orlov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000465969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Altertum

This book explores the early Jewish understanding of divine knowledge as divine presence, which is embodied in major biblical exemplars, such as Adam, Enoch, Jacob, and Moses.

The study treats the concept of divine knowledge as the embodied divine presence in its full historical and interpretive complexity by tracing the theme through a broad variety of ancient Near Eastern and Jewish sources, including Mesopotamian traditions of cultic statues, creational narratives of the Hebrew Bible, and later Jewish mystical testimonies. Orlov demonstrates that some biblical and pseudepigraphical accounts postulate that the theophany expresses the unique, corporeal nature of the deity that cannot be fully grasped or conveyed in some other non-corporeal symbolism, medium, or language. The divine presence requires another presence in order to be transmitted. To be communicated properly and in its full measure, the divine iconic knowledge must be "written" on a new living "body" which can hold the ineffable presence of God through a newly acquired ontology.

Embodiment of Divine Knowledge in Early Judaism will provide an invaluable research to students and scholars in a wide range of areas within Jewish, Near Eastern, and Biblical Studies, as well as those studying religious elements of anthropology, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and gender studies. Through the study of Jewish mediatorial figures, this book also elucidates the roots of early Christological developments, making it attractive to Christian audiences.

1 The divine image as the hypostasis of divine knowledge

DOI: 10.4324/9781003216100-2

Divine image and divine knowledge

In many biblical theophanies the deity appears in an anthropomorphic shape.¹ The distinct details of these portrayals and their immediate context suggest that the biblical authors understood these disclosures as the most important revelations about God ever given to humankind. Such revelations about God’s form are also considered to be the pinnacle of divine knowledge in early extra-biblical Jewish accounts. In some apocalyptic texts, the visualisation of God was a unique mystical experience in which a seer not only obtains knowledge about the divine form, but this iconic knowledge is literally imbedded in his new celestial ontology as he acquires attributes and qualities of the divine form that he had just beheld. In this, the human adept’s transformed body itself becomes a heavenly “tablet,” revealed now as a deposit of the iconic divine knowledge. This understanding is deeply rooted in biblical traditions about humankind’s creation after the image of God.² Elliot Wolfson suggests that “a critical factor in determining the biblical (and, by extension, subsequent Jewish) attitude toward the visualization of God concerns the question of the morphological resemblance between the human body and the divine.”³ In the biblical priestly traditions, the deity creates humanity in his own image (Gen 1:27) and is, therefore, frequently described as possessing a human-like form (Ezek 1; Dan 7). This morphological resemblance signals that from the beginning the human form was intended to be a visual revelation of the deity’s nature, attributes, and shape.

The divine image traditions have ancient cultic roots. The theophanic functions of the imago Dei and its human holder recall ancient Near Eastern traditions of cultic statues and images, which were thought to cultivate the divine presence⁴ and to communicate iconic knowledge about God.⁵ Michael Dick suggests that the Mesopotamian cult statue was “a special theophany or epiphany by which the deity’s power and efficacy are made available to the iconodule” since it was considered to be “the main conduit of divine self-disclosure.”⁶

In order to communicate the divine presence and truly become a theophany, the cultic statue must be “brought to life”⁷ through elaborate “activating” rituals,⁸ often performed with the help of a deity.⁹ Ancient Near Eastern ceremonies of the cultic statues’ animations, known as the rite of the “washing of the mouth” (mīs pî ) and the “opening of the mouth” (pīt pî ), provide important evidence for vivification ordeals.¹⁰ Some apocalyptic accounts also preserve memories of initiations used to bring some of the pseudepigraphical exemplars to eternal life.¹¹ It is worth noting that these rituals appear in apocalyptic stories where the heroes often regain the status of prelapsarian humanity.

Although idolatry was discouraged in the Jewish religious milieu, the idea of the cultic statue as a manifestation of the divine presence and a deposit of the iconic divine knowledge was paradoxically perpetuated in Israelite traditions about the imago Dei.¹² Andreas Schüle indicates that the prohibition of idolatrous cultic images in Israel

did not put an end altogether to the idea of the “image of God.” It is remarkable that very much at the same time when prophets like Deutero-Isaiah and Ezekiel poured scorn on the idols, the idea of the “image of God” was very much alive in another strand of biblical tradition that is probably about contemporaneous with these prophets: according to the priestly telling of creation in Gen 1:1–2:4a it is not lifeless matter, not a man-made statue, but humans as living beings that are envisioned to be indeed the true image of God.¹³

Schüle further suggests that:

we have strong reason to assume that the idea of Man as the “image of God” in Gen 1–9 has been developed on the background of this ancient view of divine presence in the shape of images. This view, however, has been so transformed that not a material object, a statue, but Man as a living being¹⁴ took on the role of the image.¹⁵

The replacement of cultic statues made by human hands with living icons made by God was not novel,¹⁶ but was nevertheless a significant development, because human bones and flesh became the materials used to construct a new cultic image.¹⁷ Mark Smith suggests that

perhaps the use of Biblical Hebrew s.elem for idols hints at the meaning of the human person as being in the image and likeness of God: unlike the lifeless images of false deities, the image of the human person in Gen 1:26–27 is alive and attests to the living God of Israel.¹⁸

The deity’s construction of divine images in the form of the prelapsarian Adam and his eschatological counterparts – Enoch, Jacob, and Moses – constitutes a significant development for the hypostatisation of celestial knowledge because these figures mediate the deity’s power and efficacy to their audiences not only through their utterings and books but also through the medium of their transformed bodies.

Embodied divine knowledge in the form of the imago Dei was endowed with the power of God’s presence and, as such, commanded obedience and reverence from the rest of creation. This submission is required from those residing on earth, such as animals, over whom Adam is established as a king, and also from celestial citizens – angels, who also must submit and bow down before this living manifestation of the divine presence.¹⁹

Furthermore, there are some other epistemological consequences of the resemblance. By virtue of being created in the image of God, prelapsarian humans are able to grasp the fullness of divine knowledge. This represents one of the foundational tenets of the imago Dei religious epistemology, which later Jewish and Christian accounts reiterate. These materials often connect the possession or loss of the divine image in humans with their ability to grasp the entirety of divine knowledge.²⁰ The image of God becomes a gateway to divine knowledge. In order to regain the access that was lost by humankind after their fall in the Garden of Eden, eschatological heroes must recover the fullness of the imago Dei by becoming this entity. Schüle notes that possession of the image of God makes humans “capable of approaching God in prayer, worship and sacrifice that come from its own creative powers, from its wisdom and from its deep devotion to what is made in its own likeness.”²¹

Because of this, early Jewish pseudepigraphical accounts often depict their heroes, represented by biblical exemplars, not merely as a reflection or a “likeness” of the imago Dei, but as the image of God itself, understanding them as icons of the deity who incapsulated the ultimate knowledge about God in their newly acquired ontology.

Indeed, through the eschatological transformation into the image of God, a pseudepigraphical exemplar became a conduit of iconic divine knowledge who mediates knowledge of the divine form not only to his earthly adepts but to citizens of heaven as well. This demonstrates that while some divine revelations can be transmitted via books or oracles, others can only be conveyed through the “tablet” of the adept’s transformed body.

In many pseudepigraphical accounts, heavenly knowledge read from heavenly books and heard from angels was usually transmitted through the exemplar’s writings which he copies from heavenly books or records from the instructions given by angels. Yet, the incomprehensible vision of the divine form and its embodied presence cannot be simply put on paper – it must be embedded in the adept’s own body in order that the most recondite disclosure could be transmitted to others. So, this iconic knowledge was literally imprinted on the adept’s changed physique, making him a replica of God’s anthropomorphic extent, his visual representation through which he is able now to communicate the divine presence. Moses’ shining face is one of the earliest biblical specimens of this endowment and, as such, a paradigmatic example for future transmissions of this type of iconic knowledge. However, the iconic epistemological dimension of Moses’ shining face or Enoch’s and Jacob’s transformed bodies often escapes interpreters’ attention. In order to better grasp these traditions of embodied divine knowledge, we need to investigate early Adamic accounts which lay an important conceptual background for epistemological personifications.

Background: Adam’s inauguration into the role of the divine icon

In order to better understand the complete pattern of the conceptual developments pertaining to the pseudepigraphical exemplar’s initiation into his role as the divine image, we must carefully explore the induction ceremony found in the Primary Adam Books. Although the macroforms of these books represent products of later Christian milieus, these Christian compositions are important compilations of early Jewish²² Adamic traditions.²³

Despite the fact that many details of the initiation into the divine image appear in other early Jewish accounts – including the Book of Daniel, the Exagoge of Ezekiel the Tragedian, 2 Enoch, the Prayer of Joseph, and the Ladder of Jacob – the Armenian, Georgian, and Latin versions of the Primary Adam Books²⁴ include the synopsis of the ritual’s crucial elements.²⁵ Many details of Adam’s inauguration into the imago Dei appear also in other Jewish, Christian, and Muslim materials, including the Slavonic version of 3 Bar. 4,²⁶ Apoc. Sedr. 5:1–3,²⁷ ...